On a Friday evening in October of 1999, Nicholas White was working late on his job at the New York City office of Business Week when he decided to take a smoke break. So, around 11PM he rode the elevator down from the 43rd floor of the McGraw-Hill Building in Rockefeller Center. A few minutes later he took the elevator on his way back up to his office, but he never made it up there; instead, the elevator malfunctioned, and White remained trapped in the elevator alone for the next 41 hours, until he was finally rescued on Sunday afternoon.
While the New Yorker story chronicling his experience and the “lives of elevators” is unbelievably interesting, by far the most fascinating thing about this story is the time-lapse security video of all 41 hours he spent in the elevator. It’s no more than 5 minutes long and, while somewhat disturbing, it is incredible to watch. Here’s some specifics from the article:
White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)
Moral of the story: don’t smoke.
or ….smoke all the time.
Ahhh touche my fictional brother, but keep sucking on that pipe while riding your sleigh and the poor children of the world will go present-less for the rest of eternity, do you want that on your conscience? I have an odd feeling neither you nor the ‘author’ of this blog would lose any sleep over it though.
@Mother Nature: Well, not to take sides or anything, but I have indeed lost some sleep over it. It’s almost 1:30AM right now, gosh!